


Glory and Gore

by bebtea



Category: Zombies Run!
Genre: Angst, Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Insomnia, zrs2ep14 spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:55:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28161282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bebtea/pseuds/bebtea
Summary: Simon and Five don't know how to sleep, but they do know how to banter.(Written in 90 minutes for Zombies Make!)
Kudos: 1





	Glory and Gore

Really, it should be written into the Runner’s Handbook: glory comes with gore. You’re going to see things nobody should ever see, and you’ll try to shake them off with a glass of whiskey every night, and somehow be stupid enough to come back again and again and again for more. Your reward, of course, is the adoration and gratitude of Abel Township. It’s addictive, really.

Five is addicted to the job.

That’s not so bad, really. Of all the vices one could have in a post-apocalyptic wasteland – and oh, Five’s experimented with many, before and after – running is the one that keeps everybody alive. And they crave the warmth of affirmation, the burn of acid at their calves, their heart pumping at a hundred miles an hour and Sam’s voice in their ear and welcome home, Runner Five.

If only they could stop doing it in their sleep.

Jody’s a heavy sleeper, but even she shifts and turns and mumbles in her sleep as Five stretches out and kicks her in the shins again, cycling their legs, one-two, one-two.

Simon, in contrast, is not. He hasn’t slept in four nights, and this steady, rhythmic drumming is about all he can take. He throws off his blanket, grabs them by the shoulders, and shakes them awake.

“Will. You. Stop. It.”

Five, half asleep and acting on instinct, backhands him around the face.

“Yeah. Probably had that coming.”

“Had WHAT coming?” they sign. He replies back, his sign language crude – he’d got bored in the middle of Sam’s lessons, and Five usually seemed content to listen to him chatter away.

“Get up. Let’s go.”

They end up, of all places, on the farmhouse roof, silhouetted in the full moon. Simon’s mock-smoking an unlit cigarette. He looks ridiculous, Five thinks, shirtless in the night air like a werewolf awaiting change. As if they’re in a coming of age movie. Just put on a hoodie, for pity’s sake. You’re too old for this. But all they sign is -

“Hey, does it only kill you if you light it?”

“Aw, Five! You think I’m Augustus Waters? And here I thought Eugene had the monopoly on one-legged heartthrobs.”

Five’s so stunned that he gets their reference that they can’t think of a reply for a few seconds.

“I’d light it, only Jenny hates the smell. Apparently, it ‘seeps out of my pores’.”

“I don’t want to hear about you, Janine and seeping in the same sentence.” Five mouths the words as they say them, gagging on “seep” to add to the effect. He laughs. Always a reliable crowd. “Why aren’t you with her, anyway, if I’m keeping you awake?”

“It wouldn’t be ‘proper’, apparently. Also, I keep her awake. There’s a reason why they put all the Runners together in one barracks.”

Five shrugs. Why?

“Everyone else got sick of the screaming.” He chuckles. “Being a runner is lonely. Nobody gets it except us. Jenny, Sam, they can’t… I mean, Janine understands what a mission is like, but it’s been so long since she did field work, and she’s not done it since the world… changed so much. I dunno. I talk too much about it, I suppose. People don’t want to hear how the job gets done. But you don’t seem to mind listening.”

Five is reminded of a speech Evan gave them, their third night in town, when they came to him and said they couldn’t do this. They weren’t good enough. People who want to be Runners rarely make good ones. They have some secret cowardice, or too much hubris. They get bitten, or pocket supplies for themselves, or can’t obey orders, or obey orders too readily with no initiative if comms get cut.

Simon, then, was no exception. Because he was a damn good Runner.

“I wonder if my grandma went zom. She could be dead, for all I know. Probably dead, the old hag.” His voice doesn’t hold the venom his words imply. “Still in my brain though, Five. Still whispering

Five nods, and taps their own skull.

“I dreamt about her the other day. She was stood at the kitchen sink, looking out the window. Acting like she was washing dishes. She was waiting for me to come home, though. Just standing there, her shoulders all tight, her hands… you know that pause before someone throws something at you?”

Five signs with a rueful grin, swinging forward and backward: “How’d you think I got this good at dodging?”

“Wow, we really got the best preparation for the apocalypse in hindsight!”

“None better.”

“Anyway, this plate just shatters in the door frame. Which wouldn’t have happened, because it was her best china, and that was worth more than my life. That china was there in case the Lord himself came for afternoon tea.” He snorts. “But yeah. She turns around and her whole… her whole face is just… rotting. Peeling, and this disgusting grey, her jaw unhinging itself and… well, zombified. And I’ve got my axe in my hand, but then, suddenly, I’m just a little kid again. It’s way too heavy to lift.”

“Then what happens?”

“Hey, that’s all you’re getting. Unless Runner Five wants to share their darkest nightmares with the class?”

“I’ll pass.”

He smirks, raising an eyebrow, brushing their shoulder with his fingers. “But I’d love to hear what exactly you’re running away from.”

Five gives him the finger, shifting out from underneath his hand. Don’t touch me.

He raises his hands in surrender or apology, or both. It’s so rare to get either from him that they accept it.

“I’m not running away when I’m out there.”

“Really?”

“I’m coming home.”

The two of them look out over Abel, illuminated in the clear night. The plots of land, the seeds unsown, the little schoolhouse with its chalked-out hopscotch, the kitchen and adjoining canteen, the old barn they’d changed into a pub. Armoury, chicken coop, comms shack. Radio tower, cutting into the sky like a knife, a ruby-red drop of blood on its tip. The place they’ve built, that they serve, where they should be safe, where the past somehow keeps crawling over the gates.


End file.
